“The holes in his head and chest had nothing to do with it?”
“Nope. Superficial damage only. Nothing fatal.”
“Could you tell what made them?” Al asked.
“A little bird told me the crime-scene investigators found what appears to be a bloodstained high-heeled shoe in the area. That would certainly be consistent with the kinds of injuries we found. We found a piece of rubber in one of the wounds that may very well be the tip of the heel. We gathered some other trace evidence as well, bits of foreign materials, from those puncture wounds. We’ll have to see if any of them matches up with what the crime lab finds on the shoe.”
Baker paused and shook his head wonderingly. “She must be some kind of broad.”
“What do you mean?”
“The holes weren’t fatal, but still, it takes a hell of a lot of strength to push the tip of a heel into someone’s body far enough to make a hole, especially if that person is fighting back.”
“Was he?” I asked.
“I’d say so,” Baker answered.
“Scratches? Tooth marks?”
The medical examiner shook his head, his mane of white hair fluttering in the resultant breeze. “No bite marks, but we found scratches, lots of them. Most of them appear to have been inflicted by the victim rolling around in a blackberry bramble. None that we could definitely attribute to fingernails.”
“Drugs?” Al asked.
Baker had exhausted his supply of paper clips. Now he paused and rummaged in his desk for more ammunition. “Preliminary findings say no. We’re running some additional tests though. Those take time. That’s all we’ve got so far.”
Baker waited impatiently until I finished a brief scan of the contents of the folder. When I looked up, he was holding out his hand for me to give the folder back. His message was clear: Here’s your hat. What’s your hurry?
Big Al and I took the hint and got up to leave.
“By the way,” I added casually, pausing with my hand on the doorknob. “I still need the name and telephone number of Jonathan Thomas’s attending physician.”
“The hell you do! What kind of wild hair’s up your butt, Beau? Why are you so goddamned interested in that guy? Get his number from my secretary on your way out.”
“Did you find any AIDS antibodies in Richard Dathan Morris?” I asked innocently.
Baker’s face clouded. “We didn’t look. Why?”
“Maybe you should. He was Jonathan Thomas’s roommate.”
With that, I closed the door to Doc Baker’s office. Behind us a paper clip pinged off the vase and ricocheted into the windowpane, followed by a rumbled oath.
“You screwed up his concentration,” Al said with a half-assed grin.
We stopped by the secretary’s desk long enough to pick up the name of Jonathan Thomas’s personal physician, a Dr. Wendell Johnson of the Capitol Hill Medical Group on Broadway.
Stepping outside into the still-brilliant sunlight, Big Al looked up at the blue sky overhead. He stretched and yawned. I read him loud and clear. It was time to go home. Past time to go home.
“Maybe she killed him in self-defense,” he suggested wearily, moving toward the car. “He attacked her, and she hauled off her shoe and beat the living crap out of him. How does that grab you?”
“It won’t hold water,” I countered. “If Morris was gay, why attack a woman?”
Al shrugged. “Beats me.”
Big Al Lindstrom is known around the department for his ultraconservative, middle-American, motherhood-and-apple-pie, Eagle Scout mind-set. I couldn’t resist taking a poke at him, just to see how he’d react.
“Maybe Morris was AC/DC,” I added. “What if he was a switch-hitter and he and the woman were after the same guy?”
Big Al made a face. “Just talking about it makes me want to puke. Let’s call it a day. We can tackle this mess again later. We’ll handle the notification of next of kin as soon as we come back on duty this afternoon.”
As Al walked away, I stopped and glanced up at the looming presence of Harborview Hospital behind us. My regular partner, Detective Ron Peters, was in Harborview, had been there for more than two months, recuperating from an accident. He was up on the fourth floor, the one they call the rehabilitation floor, where doctors and nurses were trying to glue his broken neck and his shattered life back together.
It wasn’t visiting hours, but over the weeks the nurses had come to know me well enough to let me pretty much come and go as I pleased.
“I’m going to stop by and see Peters,” I told Al. “How about if you take the car back to the department? I’ll hoof it down the hill when I’m ready.”